Cristina Odone is a journalist, novelist and broadcaster specialising in the relationship between society, families and faith. She is the director of communications for the Legatum institute and is a former editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman. She is married and lives in west London with her husband, two stepsons and a daughter. Her new ebook No God Zone is now available on Kindle.

Our doubts keep alive the possibility of miracles

Do you believe in miracles? In 2014, the answer is perhaps a foregone conclusion. Science offers a materialist explanation for everything from people who hear voices (schizophrenia) to manna from heaven (lice infesting the tamarisk shrubs found in the Sinai Desert). Technological and medical breakthroughs routinely save lives and restore faculties, leaving little need for divine intervention.

But the canonisation yesterday of two former popes, which drew more than a million worshippers to St Peter’s Square, means that miracles are in the news. To be proclaimed saints, it wasn’t enough for John Paul II and John XXIII to be much-loved leaders of the Catholic Church; they had to have worked miracles.

Those attributed to the intercession of the former popes include a Costa Rican woman whose brain aneurysm healed after she prayed to Pope John Paul II; and an Italian nun who survived a gastric haemorrhage when a relic of John XXIII was placed on her wound.

Incredible? You don’t have to be a “post-Christian”, as the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury calls today’s Britons, to feel sceptical. When I was growing up, my great-aunts would place a little photo of Padre Pio, the saintly friar of Pietrelcina, on my bed-side table when I came down with my annual bout of tonsillitis, and urge me to pray for his intercession. God might not grant my wish or that of my aunts, but He surely couldn’t deny anything of the holy man who bore a stigmata.

The rest of the family, including my parents, laughed at the notion of saintly relics. They found the industry that had sprung up around saints – bus tours to their shrines, plastic statuettes that glowed in the dark, plaster feet and hands – kitschy. “You make your own miracles”, my father liked to say.

His words were printed on the publicity posters at the launch of Lorenzo’s Oil, the film about his battle to save his son (my half-brother) from a neuro-degenerative disease. Nothing short of a miracle explained how an economist without so much as an A-level in science suddenly discovered an oil that stabilised his son’s neurological condition. It was miraculous, too, that a man who could not bear seeing anyone affected by serious disability should become, through his Myelin Project charity, a tireless campaigner for disabled children around the world.

John Paul II may or may not have worked a medical miracle by saving a woman from a brain aneurysm; but undoubtedly he achieved the miraculous overthrow of the Soviet regime in Poland by supporting the Solidarity movement there. John XXIII may not have healed a gastric haemorrhage that doctors had pronounced fatal; what is certain, though, is that the Second Vatican Council he led, by forcing even the most recalcitrant cardinal to help reform the Church, was nothing short of miraculous.

So even though I suspect penicillin, not Padre Pio, cured my childhood tonsillitis, I am prepared to believe in miracles of a more profound nature.

This will make rationalists snort with derision. They will say they need certainty before they can believe. But yesterday, the sermon at the Matins I attended centred on Doubting Thomas, who couldn’t be sure of the Resurrection until he touched Jesus’s wounds with his own hands.

Canon Julian Reinhold beautifully explained that the enemy of faith is not doubt, but certainty. This may not be the post-Christian era of Rowan Williams’s imagination, but it is the age of certainty. Scientists who swear their materialism is the only reality; evangelicals convinced that the Bible is literally true; Islamist fundamentalists who believe non-Muslims are infidels: these people shout out their certainty.

They leave the rest of us to struggle with our doubts. I suspect that ultimately, though, we’re better off: doubts leave room for miracles. And who, among us, wouldn’t benefit from one?